Sec. 18. In conclusion one more question closely related to the foregoing may be briefly touched upon. We have held that the individual's attitude toward a commodity is in the first instance one of putting a price-estimate upon it and only secondarily that of holding it in a provisionally settled marginal esteem. If this principle of the priority of price-estimation or exchange value is true, it seems evident that there can be no line of demarcation drawn (except for doubtfully expedient pedagogical purposes) between (1) "Subjective valuations" with which individuals are conceived to come to a market and (2) a mechanical equilibration of demand and supply which it is the distinctive and sole function of market concourse to effect. In such a view the market process in strict logic must be timeless as it is spaceless; a superposition of the two curves is effected and they are seen to cross in a common point which their shapes geometrically predetermine. Discussion, in any proper sense, can be no inherent part of a market process thus conceived. Once in the market, buyers and sellers can only declare their "subjective exchange valuations" of the commodity and await the outcome with a dispassionate certainty that whoever may gain by exchanging at the price to be determined, those who cannot exchange will at all events not lose. But considered as a typical likeness of men who have seen a thing they want and are seeking to possess it, this picture of mingled hope and resignation is not convincing. Most actual offering of goods for sale that one observes suggests less the dispassionate manner of the physiologist or psychologist taking the measure of his subject's reactions, sensibilities, and preferences than the more masterful procedure of the physician or the hypnotist who seeks to uproot or modify or reconstruct them. This is the process known in economic writing since Adam Smith as "the higgling and bargaining of the market." In fact, the individual's ante-market valuation, when there temporarily is one, is an exchange valuation of the constructive or experimental and therefore (in any significant sense of the word) perfectly objective type, and the market process into which this enters is only a perfectly homogeneous temporal continuation of it that carries the individual forward to decisive action. There is no more reason for a separation here than for sundering the ante-experimental sketching out of an hypothesis in any branch of research from the work of putting the hypothesis to experimental test. The results of experiment may serve in a marked way in both sorts of process to elucidate or reconstruct the hypothesis.